Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Mussolini's Dream Factory: Film Stardom In Fascist Italy, Book Review, Peter Catapano

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Consistent Passion, Little Fanfare: Rbg, Elizabeth Toohey

Publications and Research

Review of the 2018 documentary RBG

The Moving Collage, Tian Leng

Publications and Research

Video is a medium based on space and time, and its forms and structures change how audience perceives and understand its content. This project will construct the interaction of videos in collage and explore the spiritual side of human experience with urban environment in New York City. Local museums and historical sites will be visited to understand the context of immigration history and culture.

High-definition video will be used to capture the imagery of several performers in field. The collage of shots, rather than the edit of them, provides a new perceptual experience for this medium. The structure of video …

Building Brand Kurdistan: Helly Luv, The Gender Of Nationhood, And The War On Terror, Nicholas S. Glastonbury

Publications and Research

In the early 2000s, the Kurdistan Regional Government hired a US-based firm to begin a public relations campaign called “The Other Iraq.” Since that time, it has worked with a number of PR and lobbying firms to build a cultural, political, and financial apparatus that I refer to as Brand Kurdistan. This apparatus aims to prove to Western audiencesthat the Kurds are a liberal exception in an illiberal Middle East, and to build prospects of KRG’s eventual national independence. This article explores the connections between Brand Kurdistan and the gendering of Kurdish nationalism, focusing particularly on Kurdish pop diva Helly …

In-Terracial Conversation, Cheryl Dunye, Alexandra Juhasz

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

#Cut/Paste+Bleed: Entangling Feminist Affect, Action And Production On And Offline, Alexandra Juhasz

Publications and Research

I consider my media praxis project to be labs, encounters, theory-making and scholarly output where doing and thinking in community (often the classroom and its linked spaces) in the sites or technologies under consideration is the “scholarly” product. That is to say, the doing and the process is the product, and what remains can also be shared and/or evaluated, as needed. This sharing of process is what I model now. I describe my most recent project, Ev-Ent-Anglement, engaging again critically with social media networks from inside them, share some of my lessons learned about production and action-based New Media/DH research, …

Who Are The Stewards Of The Aids Archive?, Alexandra Juhasz, Theodore Kerr

Publications and Research

How are returns to AIDS cultural production whitewashed, and how can we return, attending with care to the earlier video work of women and people of color. How can we practice decent stewardship of this vulerbale archive?

“‘The Most Fabricated Exception’: Islam, Immigration And The White-Saviour Narrative In Laurent Cantet’S The Class.”, Elizabeth Toohey

Publications and Research

This article suggests that the acclaim director Laurent Cantet received for his 2008 award winning film “The Class” obscures the way this film reinforces the very undercurrents in French culture he sets out to critique. Rather than unearthing or mirroring the racial dynamics of twenty-first-century Paris, Cantet brings to the film a set of fascinations and anxieties latent in the French imagination about blackness, Islam and Arab culture. His preoccupations and preconceptions with race, religion and nationality appear first in the portrayal of Muslim immigrants as threatening; next, in his image of a ‘white saviour’ bent on rescuing racial minorities; …

The Dmz Responds, Seo-Young J. Chu

Publications and Research

Seo-Young Chu’s “The DMZ Responds” appeared in Telos 184 (Fall 2018), a special issue on Korea edited by Haerin Shin.

Stopping Up The Works: Weir’S The Plumber And Social Class Conflict, William Blick

Publications and Research

The Plumber, an Australian film by director Peter Weir, is an exploration of different characters from diverse backgrounds thrown together in an awkward and challenging situation. It manages to play on audience’s biases about the working class. The director succeeds in is giving us is a Hitchcockian exploration of clashing socio-educational-economical forces, and straddles the line between value judgement and simple interpersonal experiment.

A Preservationist’S Guide To #100hardtruths-#Fakenews: One Fake News Preserve, Alexandra Juhasz

Publications and Research

The author created a media project, #100hardtruths-#fakenews, to collect and preserve media relating to fake news that was generated during the first 100 days of the U. S. Presidency of Donald J. Trump. Her resulting website chronicles fake news as well as the many media responses to it. This article describes the author’s construction of the site, characteristics of the posts, and ways in which she navigated the large volume of fake news and related posts. The project explores the complex issues that attend such a project. The goal was to induce energy and insight so that thoughtful professionals might …

L.A. Rebellion: Creating A New Black Cinema, Book Review, Peter Catapano

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Of Stars And Solitude: Two Mexican Documentaries, Paul Julian Smith

Publications and Research

By happy coincidence, Mexico in 2016 yielded two expert and moving documentaries on women, sex, and aging: María José Cuevas’s Bellas de noche (Beauties of the Night) and Maya Goded’s Plaza de la Soledad (Solitude Square). Both are first-time features by female directors. And both are attempts to reclaim previously neglected subjects: showgirls of the 1970s and sex workers in their seventies, respectively. Moreover, lengthy production processes in which the filmmakers cohabitated with their subjects have resulted in films that are clearly love letters to their protagonists.

On Variety: The Avant-Garde Between Pornography And Narrative, Kevin L. Ferguson

Publications and Research

This article analyzes Bette Gordon’s first feature film Variety (1983), reassessing how experimental novelist Kathy Acker’s contributions to the screenplay awkwardly positioned the film within contemporary cultural debates over pornography and the future of avant-garde filmmaking. While centered on an erotic thriller narrative concerning a woman’s entrée into the scuzzy world of New York City porno theaters, Gordon and Acker also take up in the film a series of three related representational problems for the 1980s: feminist approaches to pornography, narrative in an avant-garde tradition, and the role of speech and writing in film.

Affect Bleeds In Feminist Networks: An "Essay" In Six Parts, Alexandra Juhasz

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

The Limits Of Transparency: Data Brokers And Commodification, Matthew Crain

Publications and Research

In the United States the prevailing public policy approach to mitigating the harms of internet surveillance is grounded in the liberal democratic value of transparency. While a laudable goal, transparency runs up against insurmountable structural constraints within the political economy of commercial surveillance. A case study of the data broker industry reveals the limits of transparency and shows that commodification of personal information is at the root of the power imbalances that transparency-based strategies of consumer empowerment seek to rectify. Despite significant challenges, privacy policy must be more centrally informed by a critical political economy of commercial surveillance.

Digital Surrealism: Visualizing Walt Disney Animation Studios, Kevin L. Ferguson

Publications and Research

There are a number of fruitful digital humanities approaches to cinema and media studies, but most of them only pursue traditional forms of scholarship by extracting a single variable from the audiovisual text that is already legible to scholars. As an alternative, cinema and media studies should pursue a mostly-ignored "digital surrealism" that uses computer-based methods to transform film texts in radical ways not previously possible. This article describes one such method using the z-projection function of the scientific image analysis software ImageJ to sum film frames in order to create new composite images. Working with the fifty-five feature-length films …

The Invisibles: Becoming And Being A Reader In A Fan-Dominated Community, Lucia Cedeira Serantes

Publications and Research

The study of comics consumption has regularly focused on the study of teens and young people. However, the association between the fan experience and comics has colonized the experience of reading comics, especially in mainstream culture, leaving almost no room for the possibility of other recognizable experiences: if you are committed to reading comics, inevitably you are, will become, or are expected to be, a fan. However, Gabilliet (2010), Pustz (1999), Parsons (1991), and Barker (1989) point at the presence and need for more research about what they labelled as “casual readers,” or the bulk of the comics readership.

This …

“Straight” Acting: Changing Image Of Queer-Masculinity In Media Representation, Zheng Zhu

Publications and Research

In this essay, I critically examine media representation of Welsh rugby legend Gareth Thomas, with a specific focus on the construction of his masculinity as an outing gay celebrity. The existing critical scholarship has studied various forms of media representation of queer images. But they did not examine how unconventional queer representation interacts with the normative gender performance. This paper investigates mainstream media’s discursive construction of masculine gay male. The findings call our attention to the emergence of macho gay characterization, which supports the hegemonic domination of heterosexual normativity. The stigmatization of gay-ness as the deviated other is rationalized through …

Wsq: Survival Editor's Note, Cynthia Chris, Matt Brim

Publications and Research

This Editor's Note introduces the WSQ issue "Survival," co-edited by Taylor Black, Elena Glasberg, and Frances Bartkowski, which explores affirmative acts of survival in the face of illness, occupation, violence, and environmental crises.

The Outsider Within: Béla Tarr And Hungarian National Cinema, Lilla Tőke

Publications and Research

Béla Tarr is probably the most paradoxical figure in contemporary Hungarian cinema. His artistic trajectory shows a movement from documentary style realism (Family Nest, 1979) towards more modernist cinematic practices (Satan’s Tango, 1994, Werckmeister Harmonies, 2000, and The Man from London, 2007). A major celebrity in the global film culture that prides itself in being transnational, international, and in crossing linguistic and ethnic boundaries, Tarr has consistently found himself on the fringes of the Hungarian cultural and political establishment. In this study Tőke considers Tarr’s films and public persona as catalysts in the debates about what constitutes “Hungarian cinema” in …

Post-9/11 New York On Screen: Mourning, Surveillance And The Arab Other In Tom Mccarthy’S 'The Visitor', Elizabeth Toohey

Publications and Research

New York, as a capital of finance and culture, has been one of Hollywood’s favorite settings, often functioning as a glamorous character itself. Yet in the wake of 9/11, escalating government surveillance prompted filmmakers to call this image into question. Tom McCarthy’s 2007 film "The Visitor" marks a turning point. Set in the aftermath of the towers’ collapse, support-the-troops signs and flags haunt the city, saturating it with reminders of 9/11’s political repercussions. In this article, I explore McCarthy’s portrayal of New York and its Muslim immigrants, who overturn stereotypes of (male) terrorists or (female) victims. Their displacement instead creates …

Becoming American: Constructing Mexican Immigrants In Local Newspapers, Zheng Zhu

Publications and Research

Media representation of Latino immigrants has been extensively studied by scholars across diverse academic disciplines. Particular to the U.S. context, preceding scholarships pertaining to the ways in which Latinos were represented centered on the media representation of Latino immigrants either as the exotic racial other or undesirable foreigners. In light of the important role that the Mexican immigrants played in understanding the current national debate on illegal immigration and the overall historical experiences of immigrants in Washington State (WA), this study critically investigated how news articles published in WA represented Mexican immigrants. As a crucial point of departure from prior …

Hollywood’S Image Of The Second World War - David Ayer’S Fury (2014) And The Depiction Of Violence In War, Frank Jacob

Publications and Research

The article describes the way in which violence is depicted in David Ayer’s World War II movie Fury (2014). It also deals with the general question how violence is visualized in current Hollywood movies.

Blood, Tits And The Modern Depiction Of Antiquity – Sparatcus: Blood And Sand And The Display Of A Historical Myth, Frank Jacob

Publications and Research

The article is dealing with the depiction of antiquity in the TV series Spartacus: Blood and Sand.

Aviation Cinema, Kevin L. Ferguson

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Digital Aids Documentary: Webs, Rooms, Viruses And Quilts, Alexandra Juhasz

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Downtown's Queer Asides, Lucas Hilderbrand, Alexandra Juhasz, Debra Levine, Ricardo Montez

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Developing Media Literacy: Managing Fear And Moving Beyond, Katherine Fry

Publications and Research

One way to view the development of the media literacy movement is through the various different ways in which strains of media literacy education have been called on to allay fears that accompanying new media technologies. This article focuses on how one media literacy organization, The LAMP, deals with two very different arenas —the internet safety arena and the news literacy arena-where fear of digital media has created narrow pockets of concern seeking narrow solutions. As media literacy grows and develops the hope is that these fears subside, a perception of separateness dissolves, and a broader media literacy vision advances.

Philosophy's Rarified Air: On Peden's Spinoza Contra Phenomenology, Steven Swarbrick

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.